Tuesday, September 20, 2016

When I think I have heard it all, then I read about Israel’s
national stench policy. I am referring to Israel’s use since 2008 of “skunk
juice” as a weapon to keep Palestinians under control.

Victims have no idea of its chemical make-up but if they are
sprayed with it, it takes days of scrubbing to get rid of the stench. In a land
where water is scarce, smelling like the sewer is a disheartening experience.

According to Ben Ehrenreich, Skunk trucks could show up at
any time, especially during celebrations, such as weddings, birthday parties,
funerals or times of worship. Someone yells “skunk,” and everyone runs.

There was that truck, the white one
idling behind the jeeps, a clear liquid dripping from the cannon on its roof.
The liquid it so violently emitted was called skunk water. No one knew what
chemicals it contained or what effect exposure to it might bring, but everyone
knew what it smelled like. It smelled like dead dogs in a dumpster in August.
Mainly, it smelled like shit. And no matter how many times you scrubbed your
hair and your clothes, the scent would linger for days, even weeks.[1]

Run home, lock your doors. You still can’t hide from it. Skunk
trucks drive down neighborhoods and business districts spraying its putrid
smell on everything within a hundred yards. Its odor may linger in clothing for five years.[2]

Skunk is powerful stuff. A reporter described its effect:

Imagine taking a chunk of
rotting corpse from a stagnant sewer, placing it in a blender and spraying the
filthy liquid in your face. Your gag reflex goes off the chart and you can’t
escape, because the nauseating stench persist for days.[3]

Palestinians living under Israeli occupation do not have
to imagine. They know:

The truck blasted Mohammad’s
house next, the jet of fluid smashed the first-floor windows and knocked him
from his feet. He had just come home, triumphant from his close escape.
Shattered glass cut his face and chest. Skunk water saturated the carpets and
couches.[4]

Forty percent of Palestinian males have spent time in
Israeli jails. Said Tamimi was one of them. After serving twenty years, he came
home to find his house saturated with skunk juice. Once this happens, carpets,
upholstery and clothes never get rid of the stench and wind up being thrown
away. Even at that, he was lucky. Others have been hospitalized, either from
the effects of the skunk itself or having been injured in the stampede running away
from it.

Israel needs a new flag, one to represent Israel today.
It would be brown. The Star of David, the symbol of a proud and praiseworthy
Jewish heritage is far, far above skunk juice.

Thomas Are

September 20, 2016

[1]
Read Ben Enrenreich, The Way to the
Spring, (Penguin Press, New York, 2016) p. 30. Even better; Google: Israeli Skunk Trucks and watch
any of the numerous videos of Israel in action.

[3]
Wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_(weapon) Skunk has been condemned by Physicians for
Human Rights, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organization, the
American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, B’Selem and the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel..

[4]
Ben Enrenreich, The Way to the Spring,
(Penguin Press, New York, 2016) p. 76.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Israel wants more; more money and more protection from
international criticism.

American journalist, Ben Ehrenreich, after traveling three
years around the West Bank, writes that when the last “peace accords” broke down,
the only people surprised were the Americans. Israel had entered into its
discussions determined that nothing would come of it, and the Palestinians had
been jerked around too many times to even hope.

He writes that all Israel wants is more:

What Israel experienced as
relative calm, Palestinians lived out as a slow and steady exercise in
annexation; more settlements, more prisoners, more evictions and home
demolitions, more land lost to the path of the wall. The number of Israeli
settlers living in the West Bank had more than tripled since the first Oslo
agreements was signed in 1993. Assaults on Palestinians by soldiers at
check-points, or by settlers anywhere else, were so common that they rarely
made the news.[1]

It adds up to four decades of humiliation, loss of
freedom and natural resources, (water,) watching helplessly as your
children are arrested, put in prison and tortured, being tried in Israeli
military courts and convicted be “secret evidence,” which they nor their lawyer
are allowed to see. The last year such records were kept, 99.74 percent of
Palestinians tried in the military court system were convicted.[2] The humiliation goes on and on. When Israel is involved, there is always
more.

At the same time Israel pleads for less. Less exposure. On April
1st, this year, Israel even
called off its infamous, erotic laced, birthright trips. In an interview with Mondoweiss Birthright CEO Gidi Mark explained:

--- Given the rightward, and
frankly racist, turn in Israel we could no longer conduct a trip that would present the country in
the most flattering light. We determined that in order to build support for
Israel, young people are best off leaving it to their imagination.

--- Time and time again we found
participants were turned off by actually seeing the country.

--- As I watched the U.S.
presidential debates, I kept thinking, “why can’t we show people the Israel
these politicians seem to see?”

--- We finally figured it out,
the best way to build support for Israel is to have as little contact with
Israel as possible.

So, birthright trips now are to a camp in the U.S. where
kids watch the movie Exodus.[3]

The less known about the real Israel… well, again, Israel
seems far better imagined than realized.

Thomas Are

September 12, 2016

[1] Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring, (Penguin Press, New York, 2016) p.8.

[2]
Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring,
(Penguin Press, New York, 2016) p.20.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

I have never, in forty three years of ministry, known the
mother of an unborn baby to put that baby in jeopardy for any reason, much less
to make a political statement. Yet, Israeli soldiers shot to death Sara
Haddoush Trayra from the town of Bani Neim near Hebron claiming that they were
under attack. The crime she committed which brought about her execution was
that she approached the mosque. She wanted to pray. She was 27 years old.

Eyewitnesses said a female soldier
ordered the woman to accompany her to a room in order to search her, and that
the soldier sprayed the woman with pepper spray, an issue that pushed her to
run away from the soldier before other soldiers shot and killed her. They added
that the army had no cause or justification to shoot the young pregnant woman,
and could have easily subdued her, without resorting to lethal fire.[1]

It is amazing how little it takes to threaten Israel’s
security. Yet, to make matters worse,
the soldiers who shot her prevented Palestinian medics from helping her. Her
baby died as she lay there bleeding to death.

I am lost for words. When fully armed soldiers have to shoot
a pregnant woman who was running away from being pepper sprayed to protect her
unborn child – if this is what it takes to “keep Israel secure,” - then Israel
needs to find soldiers a little less trigger happy and a little more
compassionate.

That is not an impossible task. I have met Israeli soldiers,
who risk being ostracized and even put in jail for treating Palestinians with fairness.
Hundreds, including officers, have declared themselves “refusenics,” meaning
that they refuse to fight beyond the 1967 borders to dominate, starve and
humiliate an occupied people.

There is a chance that Israel might become legitimate among
the family of nations and even respected, but killing a pregnant woman seeking
to pray for the well-being of her child is one post in a long fence that needs mending.

Thomas L. Are

I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased. I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.